If this happens and Cuba decides to launch drones/missiles against the US homeland, it's not an exaggeration to say that Cuba is flattened and invaded that same afternoon. After 9/11, there's no world in which any attack on the US homeland, however small or local, is met with anything other than overwhelming retribution.
Having difficulty projecting force from the air with fighter bombers launched from air craft carriers and refueling caravans from the Indian Ocean or Mediterranean Sea against a determined enemy that has been preparing for this eventuality since 1979 is one thing. Being able to fly non-stop B-52 and B-2 sorties from home air bases with single-digit-hour flight times is a different thing entirely.
The USA has been attacked before but it has never been invaded and forced to fight a war on its own soil against foreign enemies. It's possible that they unconsciously believe war is something they bring to others, never something others bring to them. It's impossible to predict how traumatizing it would be for them if that belief is proven wrong. They could absolutely reach for nuclear weapons if that threshold is reached.
Yes and the most important lesson of recent history is for have-nots to become haves ASAP.
Ukraine begs to differ.
Spot on. As an American who is quite critical of the imperialist dynamic, I still catch myself thinking this way. Like "what if Iran actually attacks something around me?" But it's war, shouldn't one expect that an enemy might attack at any point?! Except, we just don't think of war as something that might have direct repercussions for us personally, which is why most of us vote for chucklefuck leaders who start them so readily.
Ever heard of the independence war?
Iran has been on the receiving end of weapons of mass destruction, that is, chemical weapons, by way of US sponsored Saddam Hussein and lost close to half a million of their people. Yet they never for once retaliated with such weapons which to them is against their Islam.
Those half a million dead are part of a still unhealed wound and that is felt and remembered in every city and town in Iran.
Then there's nuclear defenses - if a country would have an effective anti-ICBM system (like Star Wars or whatever), it would make a nuclear counterstrike ineffective and end Mutually Assured Destruction. On paper anyway, in practice there are no perfect anti-ICBM systems, and they're effectively cluster bombs so in theory after the initial launch they can break up into half a dozen "dumb" nukes. Good luck hitting those.
There are three points of having nukes:
1. Deter other countries with nukes from using them against you, or your military ally.
2. Prevent total annihilation in the war. You can lose the war, but not too much.
3. Burn the world to ashes. Very few countries can do it. It effectively forces the whole world to make sure that this scenario does not happen. So you can be sure that scenario where Ukraine conquers Russia and completely destroys it - will be prevented by the very Ukraine supporters. They don't want to live in the nuclear post-apocalypse, because there are scenarios where Russia fires every single nuclear missile on every major city on the Earth. As Putin framed it: We will go to heaven as martyrs, and they will simply drop dead.
America lost several wars, recently they lost Afghanistan war and right now they're losing Iran war. They won't invoke nukes to overturn the table, they'll accept the lose.
Don't be naive and think that there's natural justice and the world is fair.
> Cuba might drone strike US homeland
> Cuba gets flattened
Being a superpower means being free of ethics or reason. 'We are the good' sufficently summarizes a regular US-born worldview.
You also shouldnt be too naive to think, US citizens would bring up ethics or reason when choosing their leaders or commenting on their own countrys aggression.
Why do you think, the world is unfair? Some decades ago, we had a world police.
No one said the US is acting smartly, either, but it should not be surprising that the US would react harshly to a neighbor sending rockets.
Who can recover from this, especially a small nation? You might as well declare everything to be radioactive.
So they'd react harshly even when they started it.
Don’t forget this is the internet where 12 year old girls turn out to be 40 yo men.
Yes that would be a typical US solution. Let's liberate the Cuban people! By flattening them.
There are no good guys in this conflict.
> Worst outcome is the US attacks Cuba ..
As you probably know POTUS was announcing already that Cuba would be next.
The US isn't magically off limits.
E: 50% of PRODUCTION, not plants, as in a few plants responsible for 50% of US refinery / LNG production.
This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-term US energy mix is going to stay the way it is.
The primary historical impediment to electric vehicles was high up-front cost, in turn driven by high battery costs. However:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-battery-cell-pric...
We're soon to have electric cars (and trucks) that cost less ICE ones, on top of the lower operating costs. Which in turn cost even less when more solar and wind are added to the grid because the "charge more when power is cheap and less when it's expensive" thing lowers their operating cost even further and reduces the amount of natural gas you need in the grid because periods of lower renewable generation can be offset by deferred charging instead of natural gas peaker plants.
Even without any purposeful efforts to do anything about climate change, the economics point to fossil fuels declining over time as a proportion of energy. Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years and the next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result rather than impede it. Which makes a long-term strategy of building the capacity to target petroleum infrastructure something that could plausibly be increasingly irrelevant by the time it would take to implement it.
But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Refineries just most immediately very high value targets that happens to be closest to missile range.
But the assumption is less about US adaptability/smartness, as the way commodity conventional strikes is trending, CONUS _ will _ be vulnerable eventually. Fortress America is as much function of geography as technology. Just like how 20 years ago Iran couldn't hit Israel or many GCC companies even if it wanted to... now it can. The natural outcome of longer and longer range strikes is at some point US becomes in range of Monroe neighbours who doesnt want to be Monroed.
It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it?
> Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years
Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though"
> next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result
Which will be blocked and/or immediately overturned by the current/next Republic Congress/Senate/SCOTUS/President.
Of course US can try to coerce INF for conventional in Americas, but commoditized conventional precision strike are conventional... and commoditized, it's the kind of product where specialized dual use components may need to be sourced... among millions of TEU traffic, but otherwise local industries can build, like Iran.
There's also no global pariah status for proliferating conventional missiles for self defense and hence accessible to many players, coercion / enforcement would require trying to mow grass to keep capabilities out of 600m people...in perpetuity... tall task even for even US. Especially considering form factor of missiles... i.e. sheltered / hidden, they are not major battlefield assets like ships and planes that needs to be out to have wheels turned.
Ultimately it's not about winning vs US, it's about deterring US from historic backyard shenanigans by making sure some future time when US is tempted, and US always tempted, it would risk half of CONUS running out of energy in 2 weeks.
Like the Iran logic is extremely clear now, no amount of defense survives offensive overmatch, the only thing left is to pursue some counter offensive ability that can have disproportionate deterrence value. The thing about US being richest country is US has a lot of valuable things.
For the 20 years war you are probably talking about: I wouldn't call significant civil unrest in opposition of the war "getting bored"
Yes remember when they invaded Saudi Arabia? That taught everyone an important lesson on the consequences of terrorism on American soil.
Cuba is the easiest target the US could have. It's very close to the US and very far from any potential ally. The US has never shied away from committing acts of extreme cruelty, well into terrorist or war crime territory. From dropping nuclear bombs on civilians, phosphorus bombs, drone bombing innocent people, schools, hospitals, institutionalized torture, etc. even with far weaker reasons.
There is no scenario where a direct attack on the US wouldn't lead to an extremely violent response in complete disregard of Cuban lives. And get away with it.
We do not know this. There are plentiful evidence to suggest direct involvement of the state itself, and the bin Ladin family is certainly hard to untangle from the Saudi state. That is just from what we can know from unclassified sources.
It seems to have made things better for the Taliban.
It lacks the ideology to fight such a war, since you have to be ready to die. That's why Yemen and Vietnam won, while Venezuela folded. This is also why US "culture" is so much more powerful as a weapon than the aircraft carriers.
The thing with war is that once you have it for a certain amount of time, you create a generation of people whose kids died, wife died, neighbors and family died, you have nothing to loose anymore.
There is a critical mass of casualties upon which you effectively create a population whose sole purpose, for generations, will be to resist and harm you, and that is not dependent on culture or whatever "tourism orientation" a country is labeled.
You... didn't learn history from before 1945 did you?
I don’t know, maybe it’s time for USA to just stop getting involved in wars.
In this case it's especially depressing that the war's rationale exists only because Trump wanted to tank the deal made by Obama. Which was not a perfect deal but better than the status quo back then, and much better than any likely outcome of this war.
Politics will exist for as long as there are people.
Any country not able to or interested in waging occasional war will be destroyed by countries that can and do.
Simple as that.
But please I'm interested in hearing any utopia arguments that claim we can/should deprecate war. And remember - you have to convince your country along with every other country.
You could at least say something like "we have to bomb the people so they can be free" or "don't you know the Iranians were seconds away from nuking new York, because they have no regard for their own survival".
We should "deprecate" offensive wars of choice based on lies because the opportunity cost is enormous (what could we have bought with the 200+ billion they're already looking to spend here?).
Every time we do this we create more terrorists (see the blowback incidents weve already had from this war), which results in more egregious government overreach on the domestic population (see patriot act and the experience of commercial flight in today's world).
And those are just some of the basic reasons. I don't have time to write them all.
This is not to be underestimated. It is very rare to be able to project military power far from one's capital. That the US is able to do it at all is remarkable. We should not expect it to be easy.
Or perhaps these bases aren’t just in allied countries “at their grace”. These alliance systems don’t just solely benefit America.
But it is, the US is no position to flatten anything.
Afghanistan? Lost Vietnam? Lost Ukraine? Lost Iran? will be lost
And these are heavily embargoed 3rd world countries.
In the first days of the Israeli-US war in Iran (a country under decades of embargo by the way) the US, Israel and vassals lost 60+ planes (plus who knows what else they are not reporting.
Trump is not coming out of this, if he makes the grave mistake of sending troops to their demise this administration is done.
The US is certainly in a position to flatten (with conventional force) anything in the Carribean, whatever failures it had in long counterinsurgencies where the logistics tail wrapped nearly halfway around the world. (And however badly it would probably fail in occupation in many of the places it could easily flatten close by, for that matter; flattening is much easier than occupying.)
> Afghanistan? Lost Vietnam? Lost Ukraine? Lost Iran?
Lost Ukraine? Ukraine hasn't lost and the US was never a direct belligerent in that conflict.
It seems Iran offered little to no defense against bombing raids. This may have changed recently.
Taliban is back in power, having stronger grap on power then before. Meanwhile, everybody knows what happens to those who cooperate with USA - they get abandoned and betrayed.
Ok, just follow through with the logic.
If the US 'flatteNed' Cuba (like Gaza) in response to a few drones - it would 100% make the US 'The Evil Empire' and turn the world 100% against America as a neo fascist entity.
The costs would be unthinkable, and probably the demise of the nation as a having a 'historical special place'.
It would not ever fully recover, and the 'New World Order' would be something really hard to imagine.
In reality - something else would play out ..
I think the response would be disproportionate, but probably focused, but it depends on the 'populist effect' aka what exactly Cuba attacked, and how it was provoked.
If the US attacked Cuba first, and responded with drones on a US military installation - I'll bet there is populist resistance to escalation.
Event that tussle alone would look really bad on US, would guarantee the DJT regime probably 'last place' for all US presidents, people would be calling for 25th Amendment and for new leadership, even at the same time as they might even support strikes in response.
It'll mean total political chaos until the Admin steps away, probably Congress/Institutions trying to put a 'bubble' around WH Admin.
It has already happened. Even in west Europe politicians are discussing how to protect their nations from US imperialism. Every remaining alliance the US has is strictly quid pro quo, there's no trust left anywhere (Israel being the singular exception). Meanwhile 50% of the planet is completely fed up and can't wait to have China take over as leader of the international order.
I couldn't imagine a delusional statement, considering we are literally at the moment, failing to 'change a regime' in an active war, once again!
The lack of self awareness here is ... scary.
Iran? Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam? Venezuela?
How many more lessons do you need, beyond than the one literally on your TV set right now ?
Here are some historical realities:
Nobody thinks of 'Castro Inc' as 'Communist' other than young folks on Reddit, or people listening to Joe Rogan.
Every adult - those living there, here, and elsewhere - know that Castro Inc. are ruthless authoritarians - their 'nominal communism' is barely relevant. Ideology is barely cover for anything as it is with all regimes.
If they have any residual popularity at all - it's for 'Standing up to America!' and those who held up the ancien regime in Cuba that 'Kept the people down!' - which has at least some historic resonance.
Nobody liked Saddam, nobody likes the Taliban, and the Communists in Vietnam were not popular in the South, and unlikely in the North as well.
Chavizmo had popular support, but that waned, and nobody likes the current regime.
And yet - where is all of this 'modern vehicles and commerce' in all these places?
The lack of self awareness is shocking.
The US ended up killing 100's of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Almost 1 million peopled died in Saddam's US-supported invasion of Iran.
The Israeli government has now admitted that up to 70K Arabs were killed in Gaza.
Many in the US have no problem bombing the smithereens out of civilians, so long as there can be some kind of populist cover for it even if it's totally disproportional.
If Castro Inc. were so irresponsible that they sent drones into a US base, it's entirely plausible that Trump Inc. bombs Cuba with enormous civilian collateral damage.
Whatever happens, the regime will not fall, thinking as much is a dangerous insult to reality.
The only way Cuba could be liberated by force is a 'full invasion', which is technically very feasible but completely unlikely, or, a long, protracted movement towards detente. That's it.
I sort of think it maybe is an exaggeration, you're evidently of the opinion that the U.S happens to have enough battle ready troops with the requisite hardware positioned within a few hours of Cuba so that they can invade and flatten in the time it takes to fly from Miami to Havana?
I don't know, but a Destroyer would take about 10 hours to get from Florida to Cuba.
It seems your definition of invade and flatten is just dropping bombs, but that definitely does not handle the invade part of things, and it remains to be seen as to whether, with drones, being able to fly non-stop is the great technological advantage it once was.
Some preliminary evidence from around the world suggests in a drone led conflict it confers the ability to have expensive hardware destroyed and pilots killed non-stop.
Cuba simply isn’t Iran. They’re a blockaded island with not much military experience. Iran is a huge mountainous country preparing for war for the last 40 years with first hand experience of getting blown up from above and from the inside by USA allies and surviving just fine.
I agree with you in principle, but I worry that the United States hasn't been stockpiling enough ordinance to keep that up for very long at all. We don't keep many munitions factories on a hot standby either.
How will the Americans do that? Nuclear bombs? Because it doesn't seem to me that they have the conventional arsenal to flatten a country like Cuba.
Cuba is not stupid. They will attack the infamous Conquistador Torture Base on their soil and US ships that carry out high piracy of their trade vessels.
The bay of communism needs to be regularly watered with the blood of pigs or something.
Unless it's by a right-wing white male, obvs., in which case they get promoted / lauded / re-elected / etc.
With what? The UK has already said we're not saving you this time. You're on your own now.
